Search: A Novel of Forbidden History (53 page)

Ganesh looked up from his book. “What else would navigation charts be used for?”

“Records of the weather, of storm conditions.”

“Can you read the Navigators’ hand?”

“No, Gold Master, but the storm conditions can be inferred from the charts describing wave height and wind speed.”

“What would be the purpose of that inference?”

“To better predict storms. To allow the Ship Masters to change course or delay a voyage in order to reduce the risk of loss.”

Ganesh closed his book and tapped his leaf turner on the edge of a shelf, agitated
.
“The same calculations could be used to support the contention of some that storm conditions are worse now than in the past.”

Tel’Chon agreed. “Numbers show us the patterns of the world. Some patterns do change over time.”

“But the world does not.”

Tel’Chon had thought he would have prevailed with his argument for better storm prediction. Who could argue with the need? He realized there must be a hidden reason why Ganesh was being so obstinate.

“Gold Master, I share the contention that the storms are worse. And that the Navigators’ charts show the landshapes are changing. And—”

“Enough!”
Ganesh punctuated his command with a sharp rap of his ivory rod. “You may leave now.”

Tel’Chon didn’t know what else to do, except beg. “Please, Gold Master. We’ve lost too many ships this past year.”

“Ships are always lost. The shipyards will build more.”

“With what? Each ship lost on the return from Nikenk means a loss of cargo. Of fuel. Of food. What happens if we lose so many ships the people of Carth go hungry? Or freeze?”

“That will not happen. You may go.”

“But it happened to the Navigators!”

Ganesh’s dark face twisted in anger, a rare expression in any
khai.
“You should know better than that. The fate of the Navigators is not a known fact.”

Tel’Chon felt reciprocal anger rise. “Their fate is in their books. Read them. They’re only charts and observations. There’s no sign they ever spread beyond these shores. They sailed the world, but like seabirds following the seasons, they kept returning to this one place. Never established a second home. They built this magnificent library of their knowledge. But they didn’t act on it! And when this land changed, they vanished!”

Ganesh left the central table. With a trembling hand, he clutched the neck of Tel’Chon’s tunic and pulled down, ripping the purple fabric of his scholar’s colors.

“You’re finished here,” Ganesh said. “Leave now and never return.”

Tel’Chon was stunned. To never see this hall again? To never read another book? To never know the secret that lay behind the fabric panels?

“I won’t leave.” It was unthinkable to give up the search for knowledge.

Ganesh raised his ivory rod and brought it down across Tel’Chon’s face.

The young scholar rocked back in shock and pain. “Master, no!”

Ganesh struck again. And again. Until Tel’Chon could take no more and struck back, pushing the frail scholar with the force and the anger of youth denied.

Ganesh stumbled backward, fell, and the crack of his skull against the stone floor was like a lightning strike in the great Hall.

Panicked, Tel’Chon knelt by the scholar’s side, but it was already too late. His eyes stared sightless, pupils dilated, and the blood that spread from the gash in his scalp flowed from gravity, no sign of a pulse.

With the knowledge that Ganesh was dead, Tel’Chon rose. There would be no gain in reporting what had happened. Calmly, he went to the shelves and found the book he required, listing the Navigators’ voyages from the White Island to the near outposts, across the Storm Sea.

He would take this to his colleagues in Nikenk. It was the evidence they would need to finalize their plans.

Tel’Chon paused in the open doors, looking back at the body he had left where it had fallen. He wondered what their fate would be, the ones who denied the known facts of change and who would not prepare for it. There were some scholars, he decided, who would rather curl up and die with their old books than undertake the challenge of writing new ones.

He left the Hall of the Navigators, never to return. Never to know that in the ages to come, he would be proven right.

The noise was relentless. The vast cargo hold of the C-17 Globemaster cargo transport was a drum the size of a basketball court, constantly pounded by four roaring engines ramming through the Antarctic sky.

Less than an hour out, David had wadded up squares of toilet paper from the head and stuffed them into his ears. It helped, but not enough.

He’d tried leaning back, shutting his eyes, aiming for unconsciousness, and had almost succeeded. But the drop-down canvas seat on the outer wall seemed to magnify the engine roar, and the startling bang from the in-flight refueling maneuver wrenched him from a shallow sleep with a rush of adrenaline that left him wide-awake and haggard.

Air Commandos, however, apparently could sleep anywhere, even on top of the plastic-shrouded supply pallet at the far end of the hold. Some of them were snoring. Jess wasn’t, but she was on the other side in another drop seat, eyes closed, asleep. David envied her.

Six hours into the flight from Christchurch International Airport in New Zealand, Jack Lyle pulled down a seat beside him. Like the others on this flight—including David, the twelve commandos, Ironwood, Jess, and Lyle’s partner, Agent Marano—the AFOSI agent wore a white insulated parka with matching padded trousers. When the time came to deploy, there’d be about fifteen other articles of clothing and equipment to put on, but for now, the parka and trousers were enough to keep them warm in the cargo hold. Even too warm. Lyle’s parka, like his, was open.

“How’re you holding up?”

“Doing fine.” David wished he had his iPod. It was a good conversation killer—and he could use one, especially with this man who’d threatened and lied to him.
Ambient recordings of the rain forest.
Just imagining that wash of natural sound made him relax. A bit.

“Look, kid, if you’re pissed about the way things played out, I’m sorry you feel that way, but I had a job to do. And it turned out okay for you, at least, right?”

“Peachy,” David said. He didn’t like or trust Jack Lyle. He knew the only reason he wasn’t facing charges for misuse of government resources, and
wouldn’t be in federal prison for the rest of his life—all five more months of it, if he was lucky—was that Ironwood had insisted that the original pardons he’d negotiated remain in force. His programmers—no surprise there—were already under contract to the National Reconnaissance Office to further develop the search algorithm they’d created. Now only Ironwood was left to carry the can.

David didn’t understand why he was of any further interest to the air force. “You’re only doing all this so Ironwood will give himself up. If he’d asked you to dress up like Mickey Mouse and sing opera in Times Square, you’d have done that, too.”

“That would have been easier,” Lyle said. “Anyway, just wanted to say I heard from your old boss a while ago. Colonel Kowinski. She was part of the investigation, you know.”

Big surprise,
David thought. “How’s she doing?”

“I’m sure she’d say, ‘Outstanding.’ ”

“Yeah, she would.”

“She was very curious about that nonhuman DNA sample you tried to pass off as Neanderthal.”

David tightened.
This
wasn’t Lyle’s business.

“Turns out it’s yours. Care to comment?”

David’s silence didn’t deter the agent. “Me, I’m curious about how you and your ‘anomalies’ are at the heart of everything that’s unexplained: Ironwood and his hunt for aliens. A young woman shot at in public by employees of her family. Argentines bent on blasting to oblivion whatever it is we’re heading for. All of it’s got something to do with you. You might as well tell me. I’m going to find out sometime.”

Agent Marano joined them, swamped by her military cold-weather gear. Combat wear obviously didn’t come in a size small enough for her.

She had a Thermos of coffee and some paper cups. “Caffeine?” she asked. Both David and Lyle said yes, so there was a momentary truce.
Predators at the watering hole,
David thought.

“Join you guys?” she asked.

David made no objection, neither did Lyle, so she poured coffee for herself, pulled a seat down, and sat beside her partner.

“So,” she said, leaning forward to be in David’s line of sight, “what do you think we’re going to find?”

“No idea. Your turn.”

“World War II Nazi sub base.” Marano raised her coffee cup to Lyle. “The boss thinks it’s a secret British research station. We’ve got ten bucks riding on it.”

David couldn’t tell if she was being serious. “What happens if it’s a Nazi sub base that the British have turned into a secret research station?”

Her sudden grin looked genuine. “Good one. I guess that would be a draw.” She took a sip of coffee. “Seriously, what do you think?”

“Not my area of expertise. Therefore, no opinion.”

Marano wrinkled her nose at him. “C’mon, what do you
want
it to be?”

What David wanted it to be—not that he’d tell two AFOSI agents who were riding him for no reason he could deduce—was an answer. Something that no one had thought of, no one had considered, yet would somehow reconcile everything Ironwood believed, everything Jess believed, and everything that was locked in his own DNA.

That, he suspected, was not only improbable. It was impossible.

“Whatever it is,” he said truthfully, “it’s just going to raise more questions. Finding one of anything is never enough to change a scientist’s mind. If you think about it, the experts say early humans couldn’t have made the voyage to Antarctica, let alone build anything there. So if we do find an outpost—temple, whatever—like the one in Cornwall, Ironwood gets to say, ‘I told you so,’ but in the end, it’ll be like finding those Viking settlements in Canada. People still say Columbus was the first European to reach North America because his voyage is what started the modern age of exploration and colonization. All the other Europeans who came earlier, they were all blind alleys, so who remembers them?”

“If it’s not important what we find,” Marano asked, “then why are you doing this?”

David caught the approving nod Lyle gave his junior agent.
In case there’s the slightest chance there really is an answer there for me,
he thought.
Something that might make dying easier.
“Just seeing it through,” he said. He sat back, holding his hands around the paper coffee cup, warming them.

Heavy bootsteps clanked on the metal floor of the cargo hold.

“Heard there was coffee,” Ironwood said. He’d lost color; he wore a small scopolamine patch behind each ear and an acupressure band on each wrist, both measures failing to deal with his air sickness.

“More like tinted water,” Lyle’s partner warned him. She stood to pour from the Thermos as if Ironwood were one of her superiors.

The big man sipped the hot liquid, his expression signaling agreement with her. “What’s the word?”

Marano led him through the competing theories of what was waiting to be discovered on the peninsula: sub base, secret station, a combination of both, a solitary outpost, or a temple.

“But I guess you know what’s there,” she concluded.

Ironwood stood in front of the three of them. Cold-weather combat gear did come in extra large, and, even weakened by motion sickness, he looked formidable, a walking glacier.

“Don’t go putting words in my mouth, darlin’. I know what I
expect
to find, but I’m more like my friend Dave here than you think. I won’t
know
what’s there until I see it.”

“Still,” Lyle said, “you’re thinking aliens.” David was surprised at how reasonable Lyle made that question sound. As if he wasn’t looking for an argument. Devious.

“I’m always thinking aliens, son. Ever hear of Occam’s Razor?”

Marano’s delighted smile transformed her face, making her even younger. “The simplest solution is the best.”

Ironwood gave her a paper-cup salute. “So what’s the simplest solution to the real historical conundrum? How is it that agriculture, written language, astronomy, and architectural engineering—in the form of pyramids—turn up around the world in unconnected human populations, all at the same time? Do we say it’s a remarkable and highly unlikely chain of coincidences? Or did somebody with advanced capabilities simply drop off the instruction books?”

“Okay, but why aliens?” Lyle asked. “Why not an earlier civilization that figured those things out, spread them around the world, then disappeared?”

“Very good question,” Ironwood said. “With an even better answer. No evidence. You’d think people like that would’ve left something behind. I mean, we’ve got scads of artifacts left over from the Romans, the Greeks, the Egyptians, the Babylonians—all the real, true early civilizations left their footprints in the sands of time. So, Occam’s Razor again, what’s the simplest solution? A mysterious civilization even more mysteriously disappeared off the face of the earth and took all the evidence with them? Or the spacecraft landed, handed out the knowledge we’d need to move from being hunter-gatherers to farmers—the beginnings of technological civilization—and then took off again?”

David couldn’t resist offering a third possibility. ”What if that early civilization told its followers, its students, to hide all the evidence of its existence? What if the evidence was selectively removed from the historical record, specifically to hide the fact that that civilization existed at all?”

“Conspiracy,” Marano said. “I like it.”

Lyle was no believer. “A conspiracy that holds together over thousands of years? How could anything remain a secret that long?”

“Yucca Mountain,” David said.